The company's revenue rose 6.8 percent to $48.4 million, compared with $45.3 million in the same quarter a year ago. In last year's third quarter, the SpeedFam reported earnings of $4.9 million, or 42 cents a share.

Last month, the company told investors its results would be lower than expected because of the slowdown in capital spending in the chip industry and the impact of the Asian crisis.

"As we previously announced, we are seeing a slowdown in sales of chemical mechanical planarization CMP systems to the semiconductor device market worldwide," said Makoto Kouzuma, president and CEO of Chandler, Ariz.-based SpeedFam, in a statement. "Continued softness in the thin-film memory disk and silicon wafer markets also contributed to slowing SpeedFam's revenue growth. While we believe these slowdowns will continue to affect our business near term, we continue to invest in CMP as a critical enabling technology for the semiconductor device industry."

To continue the company's push into CMP and other process technologies, SpeedFam recently began construction of a new 87,000-square-foot technology center in Chandler, according to Kouzuma.

SpeedFam's third quarter sales of CMP tools to chip makers generated revenue of $28 million, which represented 57.8 percent of its total revenue. SpeedFam said it shipped a dozen CMP systems during the fiscal third quarter.